Jonatan Schytzer of the Faculty of Law has been appointed as an expert for the World Bank

Jonatan Schytzer

The aim is to explore the links between insolvency law and climate change, the relevance of insolvency law in the global transition and potential reforms to insolvency law to support the transition. The objective is to influence legislators worldwide by making policy recommendations. In total, the working group consists of around 15 academics and practitioners from around the world, who have been identified as having valuable expertise in this area.

To find out more about this, we asked Jonathan three questions.

1) How does this project relate to your research and how did you come to be selected?

For the past two years, I have been running a research project that I call the Environment in Bankruptcy. The project is based on the fact that in recent years the media has repeatedly drawn our attention to how criminals are making money at the expense of the environment. Operators have undertaken to take care of waste, but instead of complying with current regulations, black pulp from crushed batteries has been buried in fields outside Kumla, toxic waste has been dumped near water sources on the banks of Lake Mälaren, and waste has been handled so poorly that hard-to-fight fires have broken out at waste facilities in southern Stockholm and in Småland.

There is an extensive regulatory framework for waste management. The rules are based on the principle that the polluter should pay, but in the vast majority of the cases mentioned, there is no money in the hands of the criminals or in the businesses they have run. The companies have gone bankrupt, which ultimately leads to a short-circuit in the distribution of responsibility under environmental law. There is no polluter who can pay. You could say that the environment has been bankrupted, and this is precisely the social problem I wanted to address through the project. The project is funded by the Torsten Söderberg Foundation and this year it will result in a monograph published by Norstedts Juridik.

During the course of the project, I have presented my research on several occasions, not only here in Uppsala and Stockholm, but also in Dublin, Dubrovnik, Amsterdam and Leiden. This has enabled me to come into contact with many of the researchers who are interested in these issues at a European level. I think this is precisely the reason why I was selected for this prestigious working group.

2) What will you do more concretely in the working group?

The work of the group will start with a meeting in Washington DC at the end of February. The members of the group will present their research and I will talk about "What if polluters can't pay?".

The working group will also examine potential reforms of insolvency law to support the green transition and develop policy recommendations. The aim is to have a first report ready by June this year.

3) What are you most looking forward to about this project?

I've been reading, thinking and writing about these issues for the past three years and it's exciting to test my thoughts and ideas on some of the world's top insolvency practitioners. Just such a thing as having Kristin van Zwieten, Professor at Oxford, and Ray Warner, the Chair of the academic section of INSOL International, on the working group. But most of all, I am looking forward to having the opportunity to influence how we look at these issues at an international level.